Biennale of Sydney unveils 23rd exhibition program
For Colombian artistic director Jose Roca, nature is political, which informs the riverine theme of this year’s Biennale of Sydney.
At the entry to each of the venues at next month’s Biennale of Sydney, visitors will encounter the personification of a river. The video installations will each feature a traditional custodian or other guardian of rivers in Colombia, Bangladesh and Australia, in a welcome that is both a greeting and a challenge.
The title of the 23rd Biennale of Sydney is Rivus, and director Jose Roca wants to encourage visitors to think about rivers in all their manifestations: as vital natural waterways and the life force of ecosystems, as places of agriculture, trade and deep cultural meaning, and as legal entities and sites of contest.
One of the rivers is the Atrato in Colombia, which in 2016 was granted rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration” by that country’s Constitutional Court. The river’s guardian in the Biennale videos is Alexander Rodriguez Mena, a Colombian lawyer and poet who was part of the Atrato’s case for legal recognition.
“We thought, ‘Rivers can have a legal voice and be represented in a court of law, why not in an exhibition?’,” Roca says. “We thought we could approach the custodians of each river, and ask if they could speak on behalf of the river.”
The Biennale opens on March 12 – the full program is announced on Friday – and many of the works are inspired by, have a connection with, or are located next to, rivers. In Parramatta, the Information + Cultural Exchange will be consumed by sculptural form of recycled plastic bottles, made by Filipino artist Leeroy New.
Sydney-based studio Cave Urban is constructing a bamboo “river” that will flow through the cavernous spaces of the Cutaway, at Barangaroo.
One of the major installations is The Great Animal Orchestra, in which musician and sound engineer Bernie Krause – he has worked with the Doors, Van Morrison and other artists – has recorded soundscapes of the ecologically rich but threatened Amazon. The immersive, walk-in pavilion will be erected on the Barangaroo headland, featuring Krause’s field recordings of birds and animals and a video representation of them.
“There is indication of what species you are listening to,” Roca says. “It’s very interesting, and heartbreaking as well, because many of them are already extinct – so those ecosystems don’t sound that way any more.”
Roca, 59, is immersed in the world of international contemporary art, but he’s also a nature lover and keen bushwalker. He was born in Barranquilla, on the delta of one of Colombia’s great rivers, the Magdalena, and now owns a holiday home near that river in Honda. Bushwalks and adventures with his family have taken him to Colombia’s rivers and coastal areas, and into the alpine country of the Santa Marta range.
He says it’s typical to think of mountains and rivers in a picturesque, romantic way.
“But in Colombia, certainly, nature is political,” he says. “The country has been embroiled in a 50-year internal war that stems from ownership of land. Who controls the territory is important. Nature is not just nature – it is territory and resources. Colombia is a country known in the public eye for two plants: coffee and coca. If you are talking about nature in Colombia, you are talking about politics.”
Several artists in the Biennale are from Colombia or elsewhere in South America. Abel Rodriguez (Mogaje Guihu) belongs to the indigenous Nonuya people from the Colombian Amazon. He produces drawings in coloured ink of rainforest trees and animals, showing them to be part of the same ecology. He learned about rainforest plants from his uncle, a sabedor or man of knowledge.
Another Colombian artist from Bogota, Clemencia Echeverri, produces video installations that draw on imagery of water and river systems polluted by human habitation and industry.
Roca says that where water is scarce, often there are competing interests over access to it. His exhibition’s title, Rivus, refers to an interesting coincidence of etymology. The Latin rivus means canal or stream, but Roca says the word also can suggest conflict or contest.
“I thought it was interesting that water or a stream shares the same root as rivalry – the idea that water and conflict are intimately linked together,” he says. “The moment you have a body of water, you have people upstream and downstream, or people on opposing sides – then you have the potential for conflict right there.”
Rivus gave Roca an exhibition title, but he was determined not to allow it to dictate curatorial terms. He always begins with art and with artists, rather than a concept.
“I don’t come up with a theme and then try to flesh it out with the works. I have a broad set of ideas, and then the art tells us. It seems to be the case that artists are working on ideas that we may not have explored, and you let your project be modified by the art – we started looking at art and bringing artists and other participants to the table. Slowly the theme expanded into voices of nature, rights of nature, ecosystems between the natural and synthetic.”
Roca has been a curator for major exhibitions, including the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil, and is the founder of FLORA ars+natura, a not-for-profit space in Bogota. He has been critical of the large-scale international art fares that consume carbon in freighting artworks, artists and curators around the world. He would have liked his environmentally themed iteration of the Sydney Biennale to be carbon-neutral or close to it, but realised that would be impossible without the purchase of carbon credits.
He has opted to use recycled materials where possible and has put limits on freight and travel. Instead of being a fly-in, fly-out director, he moved with his wife to Sydney so he could plan the exhibition from here. He engaged a curatorium of four Sydney-based curators – Paschal Daantos Berry, Anna Davis, Hannah Donnelly and Talia Linz – whose local knowledge and specialist expertise also helped reduce carbon-hungry travel.
Several of the artists are using recycled materials. Israel’s Gal Weinstein produces landscape installations with materials such as used coffee grounds, which are allowed to grow mould during the exhibition, and are then turned to compost. Other artists, such as British duo Ackroyd and Harvey, use living plants such as grasses, which in turn sequester carbon in the atmosphere.
Australians in the Biennale include Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal artist D. Harding, who is producing a wall carving based on ancestral waterways, and Mike Parr, who is to give a durational performance involving meditation and fasting in response to the “Joseph Beuys tree” at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Roca says Biennale venues have been chosen to minimise transport costs and carbon emissions. While the exhibition program stretches out to the Parramatta River and to La Perouse on Botany Bay, most of the activity is happening close to the harbour, from Barangaroo to the Museum of Contemporary Art and the AGNSW. The Biennale will make use of the vast post-industrial spaces of Pier 2/3 at the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct, newly upgraded as an events and cultural venue. The Cutaway at Barangaroo will have a meeting place called the Waterhouse, for educational programs, talks and events.
Even so, a large-scale installation such as The Great Animal Orchestra, with its array of LED screens, inevitably consumes power, just as large airconditioned galleries do. And it wasn’t always possible to find supplies of next-generation recycled materials that met requirements.
“We tried, but we were unsuccessful to have a sustainable Biennale,” Roca says. “A sustainable biennial is a contradiction in terms – it’s all about bringing the global to the local for a short period of time. It’s very difficult to make that sustainable. If you want the experience of an art exhibition, then you have to spend energy doing it.”
The Biennale will not be producing a catalogue as such. Brief wall labels will identify each artwork and QR codes will enable visitors to access more detailed notes on their smartphones. Instead, the Biennale is producing a 500-page book, made entirely from surplus paper stock, and containing essays, poetry and lyrics that address the Biennale’s riverine theme.
Roca hopes people will experience the multi-venue exhibition as if leapfrogging across different lily pads.
“We are considering each one of the venues a territory in itself, that is related by flora, fauna, people and objects,” he says. “We are calling those territories wetlands.”
Rivus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, March 12-June 13.
When silence meets Jewish grief
Ruby Kraner-Tucci’s Jewishness was always a novelty for her friends – but when she needed their support in the wake of October 7, she found none.
Tom Lehrer: the droll dissenter who revelled in bad taste
Before Tom Lehrer opened his mouth, he seemed the image of decency. Yet as soon as his fingers hit the keys he revealed himself as the imp he really was, goading his listeners to clutch their pearls.